That "TJ Rogers" article is reporting itself as "not found." (EDIT: Never mind, I tried again and it loaded.)
Also - meaning absolutely no disrespect to sama - but why specifically is he on the list? I've used Loopt, and while it's very good, it's not particularly interesting in its design, and while it fills a pretty huge niche, so do quite a lot of other startups. I'm certain other sites have more users, more addicted users (Facebook?), and more constant activity.
Perhaps it's a matter of knowing Sam in person? In that case, I'd be curious as to what exactly makes him such a memorable figure.
From what I've read/heard, the guy is fearless and can make anything happen.
"Sam Altman could parachute into an island full of cannibals and be king within 5 years."
When I was his age, I was boldly drinking my first beer and trying to figure out who I was. He was apparently building autonomous helicopter navigation systems, making deals with major cell phone companies, and getting prepared to be a speaker at the Apple WWDC.
I've never met him, but from what I gather he just has the "it" factor.
I mean, again - don't get me wrong, because he's a very impressive guy. I hope that I'm able to do things that great that young. But "young ultrasuccessful founder" is not a rare thing. Being a billionaire before 25 has happened again and again.
But we're all aware of that, since the culture is so ultrafocused on the youth and beauty brigade. And obviously PG isn't writing Sam in because he wants to promote Loopt, because Sam doesn't need another Inc mention beyond the ones he's had already. So I'd be interested in what exactly Sam's on the list for, since I know next to nothing about the guy.
> But "young ultrasuccessful founder" is not a rare thing. Being a billionaire before 25 has happened again and again.
What exactly do you consider 'rare?' According to Forbes, there were 691 billionaires in the world (of all ages) in 2005. In a world with about 7B people, the probability that you be in that group is
691/7000000000 = 9.87142... e-8 %
Sam is no billionaire, AFAIK, but he shares the qualities of approximately 0.0000001% of the world's most financially successful population. On top of that, he's in his early 20's. The number is even smaller if you include the handful of members in this demographic. Quite a good justification to be on that list, IMO.
Apologies. Using the phrase "billionaire" was exaggerated. (I think that billionaire before 25 has happened twice or thrice?) There are, however, many, many young tech millionaires.
My point, as I said before, wasn't that I was critical of him, and - again - I'm certain he's on the list for good reason. I just want to know what qualities in particular elevate him above all those other people who could have been included.
You can read what he says about doing bizdev. Considering he got big companies to work with his startup, I think there's probably some nuggets in there.
He didnt compare loopt with apple, he compared Sam with Steve Jobs, how old is sam? plenty of time for bigger things than loopt(which is still a pretty impressive achievement)
Don't get me wrong, that's very impressive, but that's hardly a unique case. First person that comes to mind, again, is Mark Zuckerberg, who left Harvard. (Not to mention Bill Gates, who did the same a generation earlier.)
It's the equivalent of listing the "5 albums that influenced you the most". There are many answers, no one is saying that Sam has done something that has never been done before.
I find this speech baffling. Investors don't make companies successful, sales do! Do you want taxes to increase on the people investing in companies that may or may not succeed or do you want taxes to decrease on the people who buy your products. Cutting a companies taxes doesn't increase the amount of people a company can hire. However, cutting the taxes of the people who buy your products will likely increase sales. These increased sales mean more money to hire more people.
Let's be real. Companies will hire the minimal amount of people to get the job done. They aren't going to hire people willy nilly because they get a tax break. Companies will hire more people when their sales increase and they need more bodies. To increase sales you decrease the taxes on the consumer class.
I enjoyed a book by Thomas J. DiLorenzo, "How Capitalism Saved America," where he points out that we haven't really practiced Capitalism, but Mercantilism, instead.
Wouldn't it also depend on what type of company we are referring to? Or timing? Aren't companies that do not have a product yet beholden to investment?
It seems that it might take too much time to have individual buyers' purchases fund a company that requires a large investment in infrastructure to get going...
I wrote "I guess what it means to me is the less government meddling in the market, the better. The Government is already having a hard time fulfilling their regulatory role, no need to have them waste more time skewing markets with pricing controls/subsidies."
I've learned a lot from Rtm about various things, especially hacking, but not much about startups for the simple reason that we both learned about startups at the same time from the same experiences.
Well he pretty much single-handedly (as I understand it from lore) talked major carriers into supporting Loopt on their phones.
Considering how carriers normally treat new technology, this shows considerable force of will. To even get them to listen to you would be impressive. The fact that they agreed, more so.
Back when I was in college, I decided to be an RA for a Freshman dorm during my Junior year. Two of my freshman in my dorm were Sam Altman and Blake Ross. We took a class together called Internet Technologies (CS191i).
Our first assignment was to build a VERY rudimentary web browser in Perl; all it did was, open a socket, accept and validate a URL as input, and print out the result of a GET request from a web server. The creator of Firefox was assigned "build a web browser" as homework!
Needless to say, both Sam and Blake dropped out of school before the end of their Sophomore year.
There is a weird disparity between the programmers I read on the internet and the programming students I know in real life. The programmers I read on the internet are self-taught, have side projects, and are intimidating. The programming students I know in real life are college-taught, generally don't have side projects, and aren't intimidating.
I think I belong to the second group more than the first. Should I switch to a different major? Or is there a place in the world for programmers who aren't hackers?
As a third option, someone might have some magical "how to become a hacker" advice that I haven't already read.
I don't quite know what you mean by hacker - do you just mean you haven't worked on stuff on the side? As for intimidating - I don't know if I've ever met a hacker in real life that really seemed intimidating. A lot of people develop a sort of persona online, either because they think they're cool or because they're so flooded with work that they simply don't have time to talk to every single person they meet. So the more that you do, the more mail you get from people, and the harder it is to respond to them, and the more it seems like you're exclusive and therefore intimidating.
Don't switch majors because of other people. Switch if you don't like what you're doing. Do you really like programming, exploring code or at the very least making that code work? If so, there's bound to be a place for you. As for "becoming" a hacker: again, try not to look at other people. The path to people having ideas and making projects is always a bit askew and twisted. If you ever want a side project, go ahead and start one. Get your hands dirty. The more you do, the wiser you get. But don't feel like it's a necessity.
Also remember that lots of college students are just learning to code. The self-taught kids have a few years' advantage in a lot of situations. That doesn't necessarily make them better (though a lot more of them have an aptitude for the subject matter). It's certainly possible to get into programming late in your career and still turn it into something meaningful.
By "hacker" I mean someone who has the compulsive curiosity for programming that some of you seem to have. And by "intimidating" I mean they seem like they might be much better programmers than me. (Hence virtual experience is just as good an indicator as real-world experience.)
Not everybody here is a compulsive programmer. I'm not a particularly good programmer myself: my focus is more on designing and building things that don't exist already. That's the great thing about the industry: it's so huge that you can focus on one of any number of things and still find success at what you do.
I think you mean CS 193i. It's fairly well known that the CS 193x series are all "easy", non-intensive, non-academic courses designed to teach something useful (there's "high-performance websites", "internet technologies", "iphone programming", "client-side internet technologies", etc.) They have very few if no prereqs other than perhaps some programming experience.
And the point of that assignment wasn't to "build a browser". It's to introduce the students to sockets and HTTP. Just what you'd expect for CS 193i.
There's classes for many many things at Stanford as there are at many other schools. Internet technologies etc happen to be among them and they happen to be offered under the CS department (which is probably the most appropriate one). The CS193x change from year to year I think, I remember there was a CS193j (programming in java) at one point but it seems to be gone now.
They are not required courses for the CS degree. IIRC I don't think they can even count toward any of the CS degree requirements themselves. You do get credit for them though and you need a certain number of credits to graduate regardless of major.
So basically you take them if you're interested in them and would prefer to learn about them in a classroom environment.
How about Richard Branson? Who has created more $1Bn companies in different marketplaces (and had fun along the way)?
I count 4/5 so far Virgin Records, Atlantic (& Blue) airlines, Radio, Mobile/Media... and counting (for example Virgin Galactic & Rail are getting there).
The question specified "Within the last 30 years" - Branson started Virgin more than 40 years ago. Though I kinda wonder why Steve Jobs is on the list then, since he started Apple 33 years ago. Maybe he just squeaked in...
"The Doctrine of the Elect better known as predestination or foreordination is the belief that when a person is born or at any time later in their life, they might be chosen by God to become one of the Elect, which is one of the people who would receive divine salvation."
Doctrine of the Elect is also significant for creating voluntary association, which has been a subtle but important catalyzing principle of western civilization.
Steve Jobs founded Apple in 1976. (To mentions of billg, he founded MS in 1975.) That was over 30 years ago. While it is nitpicking, I'd like to see them cleared out for more novel choices.
Sam Altman at Startup School 08 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m43t44WL8-w